15 ms·

Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

510 points by DarkContinent 7y ago

eeZah7Ux 7y ago
WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting. Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- jka 7y ago
  The article is, in part, suggesting that it's exactly those kind of status-conscious people who benefit from 'meeting therapy': "Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration." But yep, that might not be ideal for a participant who would prefer to be making progress on something else. I've seen a bunch of tech companies start to suggest to employees that they can and should leave meetings if they don't feel like their presence is important.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    "outlet for people at work" hints that benefits everybody, or the majority. "outlet for management" sounds quite different.
    - jka 7y ago
      Yep; I'd imagine that's an intentional distinction by the author. Some people might act this way regardless of whether they move between a management or individual contributor role.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Sounds like the management - who are also employees - are the ones who get to vent.
- abawany 7y ago
  In fact one of the easiest way to get disinvited from such meetings and get a less-good performance review next time around is to make a bit of noise about the utility of such meetings (edit: from my personal/anecdotal experience). Serendipity is good.
lukethomas 7y ago
There's some truth to this, but holy smokes, another meeting is not the cure. There is value in "venting" at work. A few years ago I built a software tool that pings people at the end of the week asking how their week went. Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. In fact, some people literally called it therapeutic. It turns out that writing things down can serve as a form of "therapy" (source: https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/ https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/) If you lead a team, I'd strongly recommend you have a feedback mechanism like this in place, but a meeting is not the right medium. It's just a place for the extroverts to complain. If you do hold a meeting for this stuff, a 1-1 is probably the best way to surface a similar level of information.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  > Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. This is very much me. I am an introvert, and despite being a team lead, will get run over by louder more assertive folks. I'm learning to stick up for myself (only been a lead for 2 months) but it's a long road. With an email or chat, I can reformulate what I mean to say multiple times. Refine my message and make it clearer and cite sources. I can also take the time to examine my emotions and motivations in creating the email, and sometimes just discard a whole email if I've managed to work through something myself. Unfortunately for people like me, extroverts tend to be most visible so their preferred way of doing things, talking in meetings, is how a lot of business seems to be conducted.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    You sound similar to me a few years back! Here is what I did (suggested by a boss who was magic with meeting effectiveness), YMMV: - Come to meetings with a short list of decisions to be made or expected contributions - Bring suggested resolutions if I owned the meeting / was primary technical resource / team lead and had some to suggest -- and communicate that these are the default in absence of consensus or buy-in - Put discussion time allotted stacked to each decision to be made (moderately flexible) - Always end meetings early if no more content is to be discussed Meeting agendas can be powerful.
asaph 7y ago
People should decline pointless meetings.
- helpPeople 7y ago
  What if it's pointless to you, but someone else needs to hear the status because they need to decide what's important to tell the vice president?
  - asaph 7y ago
    Do you mean the Bee-Watcher wants to know what to tell the Bee-Watcher-Watcher?
    - potta_coffee 7y ago
      I no-shit had a manager that made zero decisions or contributions, but wanted detailed notes on what we were doing so that he could take credit for our work in meetings.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  An interesting idea...supposedly at Tesla and SpaceX, Elon recommended that anyone who found a meeting to be pointless should get up and leave immediately. I don't know if that's still the practice, maybe someone from those companies can chime in.
  - crustacean 7y ago
    That has presumably worked _for Elon_...
  - abawany 7y ago
    David Marcus (FB, previously PayPal) had (has?) a similar stated policy regarding meetings.
- crustacean 7y ago
  If my meetings happened as described with no one rescheduling or derailing them then actually my meeting life would be fine. I want to go to the meetings described on my calendar. But nearly every time “It’s a trap!”
bransonf 7y ago
The problem I experience with meetings is that often times the information presented is only tangentially related to you. I hate it when I’m in a meeting and it ends up a conversation between two people. It’s stressful if you have an expectation to get something done but also an expectation to sit in a meeting you realize really doesn’t pertain to you.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  Once upon a time, this was the point of circulating 'minutes' or a summary after meetings. Outside of some special cases (e.g. the Federal Reserve), they're specifically meant to reflect conclusions, not the full course of discussion. Back-and-forth that reaches an answer isn't needed, and a debate that ends unresolved would just read as a summary of the positions. That way, you can invite the people who need to speak in a meeting, while anyone who just needs to be informed about the result can catch up from a shorter, async source. It seems like easy video recording and calling have been one reason for the decline - minutes were handy if someone couldn't make the meeting, but now they can dial in or watch it afterwards. That's great for not having to create a summary, but I think it loses much of the value of a concise, written record of what happened.
  - dpeck 7y ago
    The number of people who have ever watched/listened to a business meeting after it occurred is vanishingly small.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Depends on the minutes. I've seen some where the entire minutes where things like "Heard the report from the director of X on the state of Y". I would like to know if the department in question is a useful use of my tax dollars, so I really want to know what the state of Y is, but I'll probably need to do a FOIA request to get it.
- jjkmk 7y ago
  I guess it depends how big your team is and how big the company is. Working on a small team at my current company I don't have this issue at all. I remember when working at IBM that was my main gripe.
rusk 7y ago
Sounds like a local maximum at the organisational scale.
cyborgx7 7y ago
I've had times when a pointless meeting with too many participants was a welcome break. Of course, just reducing the work week and having more free time would be a lot better. But I'll take what I can get.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email. It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication. Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration. The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style. So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.
- steve1977 7y ago
  Yeah you have to get rid of pointless managers. Pointless meetings will disappear automatically then.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Pointless meetings are just a part of meetings. Imo you can't have valuable meetings without pointless ones. Knowing how to best minimise the toil is key.
- mipmap04 7y ago
  I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.
ckastner 7y ago
The article lacks one important detail: number of companies studied. Because frankly, it sounds a lot like n=1, and generalizing from one (or possibly a few) dysfunctional examples is a fallacy. And even if there were an overall trend: not addressing other scenarios seems like a substantial omission regardless. The article makes it sound like the whole world needs status validation and/or a place to vent. I know enough places where stuff like that gets shut down, hard.
holstvoogd 7y ago
I call BS. Meetings make me lose the will to live & drove me to quitting my job multiple times. If you want to make sure I don''t do anything during the day, put in a meeting in the middle of it. Perhaps it helps people who have pointless jobs that create no value?
- cabraca 7y ago
  I call your BS call :) There is nothing better than a day with nicely spaced meetings My current Project on every second wednesday: 10:00-10:30 Daily Standup 11:00-12:00 Architect Jour Fix 12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak 13:00-14:00 Sprint Retro 15:00-16:00 Sprint Planning Most of the gaps have a reason (conflicting meetings, etc) We use those gaps to "transfer knowledge". That basically means we sit in the cafeteria chatting about work or non-work relatet stuff, planning our weekends, etc.
  - t34543 7y ago
    Terrifying schedule. I can handle maybe an hour of two of meetings per day, max two days per week. Daily meetings are a non starter for me.
    - cabraca 7y ago
      its not daily. its one day every two weeks.
      - dasmoth 7y ago
        The standup is still daily though, right?
        cabraca 7y ago
        yes
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    Wait, you're actually putting that forward as a good day? That boggles my mind...if you come in at 9, get settled, you have maybe 45 minutes to work. Then, until 14-15, you have NO one hour stretch, then you have just one more stretch from 16-17...when do you actually code?? Don't you need a couple hours of focused time?
brodo 7y ago
Can anyone find the original paper? The press release is here: https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad-reputation/ https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad...
- teddyh 7y ago
  The Swedish version of the press release (https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt-rykte/ https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-dali...) has a reference; it seems to be a book: Mötesboken : Tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel, by Malin Åkerström, Vesa Leppänen & Patrik Hall. (ISBN 978-91-984203-6-4) https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc-acbb-91a16f042c07 https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc-...
roland35 7y ago
I thought Wrike had a pretty good infographic on deciding whether or not to have a meeting: https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2015/06/Should-we-have-this-meeting-e1434381032233.jpg?av=b36e9b420136299c52657400eb7d40a0 https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2... Basically you should have a meeting if: * It can't be solved by collaborating outside a meeting * Everyone is needed to participate * The group has authority to act * There is a clear agenda and goals * Someone can be the facilitator I have found that if a meeting has all those elements than a lot can get done very quickly, rather than having ideas bounce around email or slack for weeks!
robotmay 7y ago
This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but if you're actually trying to be productive it's a horror-show. I had a 3 hour meeting a few weeks back, and then another meeting directly after it which was a summary of the previous meeting. Add to that the fact that 90% of the company are incapable of being on time to those meetings, and you can probably guess as to one of the reasons I'm moving on to another company. The meetings are usually also at short notice and the person who requests it will universally be late to their own meeting. I see excessive meetings and calls as a failure of written communication skills. The people I see organising the most meetings are also those who are least adept at understanding writing, and the worst at communicating via it themselves. There's definitely an art to being a good written communicator, and maybe there should be more emphasis placed on it when recruiting in tech roles.
- dhdhebsb 7y ago
  I must work at the same place
- journalctl 7y ago
  Lots of meetings can also be a sign of churn. If people can’t make decisions, or consistently flip flop on decisions, it can be reflected in lots of (ultimately pointless) meetings.
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Nokinside 7y ago
Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented. Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of view yet.'
- altacc 7y ago
  So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.
  - patcon 7y ago
    Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp. What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders prioritise leadership via _authority_. Think of it as accruing power in the edges vs the nodes of the social graph. Fun fact: countries whose leader cultures are more individualist (e.g. America) are MUCH more likely to have whole populations who agree highly with "economic growth is important above all else", whereas collectivist leader nations (e.g., Taiwan, Finland) have a general populace who agree less highly with that phrase, but MORE highly with "ecological sustainability and environmental stewardship are important". So while correlation doesn't prove causation, it may be the case that American-style individualist leadership culture is in opposition to our shared goals of non extinction :) but that's maybe a leap. The whole study is really rad. Oh, and more bonus: collectivist leadership style correlates highly with feminine leadership style (another axes of Hofstede study) EDIT: a-ha! Found the source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
mbubb 7y ago
Makes me think of Ray Dalio on transparency and 'meaningful work'. I agree that people want to vent and be heard but as others have noted meetings turn into a way for management to reinscribe control and turn complaints back on the complainant (Learned helplessness,etc) If we need meetings to define our job then that is pretty unclear management. If you dont see how your role pertains to the overall goals of the org and need meetings to figure this out then there is a general disfunction. Meaningful work and the ability to give and receive feedback. Less meetings.
cryptica 7y ago
It's therapy for the worst kinds of people. For productive people, meetings are horrible; akin to sitting there and watching a bunch of monkeys howling and banging on their chests to maximize the amount of bananas that they're going to get at the end of the month.
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throwaway68AC2 7y ago
I feel fairly alarmed and skeptical at the idea of managers being therapists, not because I think it’s a bad idea — in fact I think it ought to be a good one — but because in my experience, most of the folks asking for your vulnerability in the business world aren’t willing to off any in turn.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  No, its not the managers who are therapists. Everyone forced to go to their meetings are providing free therapy for them.
- deleted 7y ago
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WhompingWindows 7y ago
Isn't this title a contradiction? They aren't pointless meetings if they are therapeutic for the attendees. Now, what about pointless AND non-therapeutic, is that possible?
sargram01 7y ago
There’s also the class of pointless meeting where nontechnical managers don’t understand what they’re responsible for so use them to as a way to “manage by feel”. They call them to see what people’s reactions are to fishing questions to judge the situation, and to use them as training sessions. These I find to be the most counterproductive meetings.
Nursie 7y ago
> Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration. Yup, see this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I try to avoid most of them. Nothing gets done, half the people aren't really prepared, and the usual outcome is the guys with the biggest egos sound off and make themselves feel important and everyone else just has a good old moan. It may be therapy for them, but I'd rather not be there, thanks!
kube-system 7y ago
I'm not sure meetings in most organizations are the result of people 'asserting authority' or people 'unsure of their role'. Almost no managers are calling meetings to fulfill some hidden agenda or personal gratification. Most are called by people who are legitimately trying to solve a problem. They're just a product of a lazy/ineffective management style. The problem is, proper task delegation requires a lot of work: 1. understanding the problem (probably the hardest problem) 2. understanding the organization and resources 3. breaking down the problem 4. assigning tasks appropriately 5. managing time, both of the process, and the delegates of the tasks. When a manager does this properly, it's not a very 'visible' process, so nobody really knows they've done all this work. Alternatively, lazy managers can just call everyone into a room and let them figure out everything. It doesn't require any upfront planning or understanding of the problem. And it comes with the bonus of high-visibility. TL;DR: meetings are the result of lazy management.
kstenerud 7y ago
In other words, more and more people are being employed in pointless jobs. There isn't enough actual work to go around, but everyone needs to be "employed". And since they subconsciously know that their jobs are pointless, they need to justify their existence through posturing and status and "visibility" and report production (which nobody reads) and endless meetings. Lots of activity, but little actual achievement. Middle management only ever grows @1, because everyone in the middle is in the same boat, and having more people under you makes you more important and less likely to lose your job or have your department cut. @1: With the exception of the massive job purges the mega-corporations do once a decade or so.
webew 7y ago
This reminds me of open-plan offices. What a nightmare.
corodra 7y ago
Wasn't it Microsoft Japan that realized meetings were naturally crunched down to strictly useful ones when they went to a 4 day work week? Then more time was spent doing real, actual work and then workers being able to ACTUALLY relax at home or doing something truly therapeutic... like not being at fucking work. Not this bullshit "you can relax at work" crap. Oh, and their employees felt ACTUALLY better and ACTUALLY less stressed. I feel like this "study" is more a focus-group bullshit attempt to fight off the results of a 4 day work week. The world is getting silly. Not because of studies like this. But because people actually agree with obvious bullshit like this. I feel like I'm taking damn crazy pills.
throwaway5752 7y ago
One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it. There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly structured meetings that waste time. But a sizeable (mostly) silent group of people appreciate reasonably scheduled and structured meetings in the way described in this article. To each their own.
- manmal 7y ago
  I don’t like meetings because they are not „productive time“, but I do like them because they do, as you wrote, fulfill my socialization needs. Onsite meetings work way better for me in that regard.
waspleg 7y ago
"People often feel marginalised. They feel that they have no influence or position. In these cases, the perception is that meetings do not improve anything, but actually cause even more frustration." Literally the last paragraph hits the nail on the head for, I'd wager, the vast majority of people.
- ubu7737 7y ago
  I agree with you, but I want to add some precision to this. In some meetings I feel powerless, and I find them absolutely horrible. In other meetings I have a voice anytime I want to use it, and I feel powerful, and I wouldn't miss them for anything less than a diarrhea poisoning incident. Edit: In most meetings I feel neutral and disaffected.
hurrdurr2 7y ago
We are a manufacturing facility and the amount of meetings to discuss how to best implement LEAN, 6S, and kaizen has become comical. Many of these meetings indeed turn into complaint fests between managers from different groups.
viburnum 7y ago
It makes sense, since most therapy is about as useful as pointless work meetings.
eris_agx 7y ago
This articles reminds me of Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law Without efficient ways of doing things managers want more people doing things like them. Like the traffic problem doesn't get better with more lanes.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Exactly and the point I was going to make, and pointed at in the article (toward the end). Uncosted inputs will be used to the limits of tolerance of costed inputs. Time is a near-universal uncosted input, at least in internal allocation.
rdiddly 7y ago
Oh I have no doubt that they're therapy... for certain people who need therapy. I even referred to a certain recurring meeting recently that always tends to be mostly a particular guy talking, as his therapy session. So I feel vindicated now!
theonemind 7y ago
I don't disagree with the article. Without articulating it, I always thought so--precisely that makes many meetings so infuriating for me personally. I don't have the job title of therapist or actor/background extra.
Ericson2314 7y ago
The ideas are not knew here, and I am largely sympathetic, but it's really funny to hear what is usually normally presented in David Graeber "you should relate to this and be mad" form here presented presented in dry "studies show..." form.
drugsupplychain 7y ago
There's an interesting hatred of meetings by software engineers, and I think it's to far on the hatred spectrum. There's definitely a lot to hate about meetings and they are very poorly run in general. But the argument of "when do you do actual work!" is not a good one. If you run an organization of 200 people, it's a lot more effective for 25 people to spend all of their time making the efficiency of the team, and impact of the team on the business as high as possible, than it is to increase the team size to 225. If those 25 people can, through messy meetings, debates, and emotional outbursts, somehow make 200 ppl twice as effective, that's great! I think a better framing for meetings is not by looking at the battle, but the war. Individually, yeah it can suck. But the goal is to ensure a large amount of individuals march in the same direction, toward the same goal, and are progressing the business forward. Some amount of work is needed for that. Let's optimize for maximizing that impact, not how "good" the process feels.
- randomsearch 7y ago
  Coding takes an enormous amount of concentration and headspace. Meetings are context switches that make retaining focus much harder. That’s why coders hate them.
antipaul 7y ago
Important context quote: “Instead he says there has been a rise of managerial roles, which are often not very well defined, and where "the hierarchy is not that clear".“ So this article doesn’t apply to tech-focused organizations. For sure, meetings are still relevant there, but should trend to fewer not more
ilaksh 7y ago
"Many managers don't know what to do," he says, and when they are "unsure of their role", they respond by generating more meetings. Another reason that we should have less managers and instead elevate engineers into dual engineer/executive positions.
GordonS 7y ago
True story: A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were some relatively meaningful small meetings closely related to actual development work. Everyone was losing the will to live, including myself - there simply wasn't enough time to actually work! I had a word with the project manager, and with a totally casual manner he said: "OK, let's have a meeting with the whole team to discuss it".
- pc86 7y ago
  It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person. And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings (agreed it's definitely too many though).
  - GordonS 7y ago
    > It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person So, it's meant to be an amusing anecdote on HN; I haven't told the entire story of the project :) The PM had heard this from several other team members alread, several times. The difference is I was tech lead, so he listened a bit more to me, and I was also quite adamant this time (I'd tried to tell him more politely numerous times). > And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings Bingo, this was the biggest problem - the project manager in particular was bad for telling irrelevant people to join meetings.
- mr-ron 7y ago
  All those meetings are necessary if you do by the book scrum. But usually it's the tech lead role that's most important to have attend. Did the whole team attended each of these?
havkom 7y ago
Many meetings are extremely important for me as a manager. Very few of the meetings are about “deciding things”, rather they are about aligning views. As a manager I see my role as setting up meetings so that the most qualified peoples views properly influences the right stake holders. When everyone aligns on what problem to solve and how to solve it there are generally no need to take any decisions, since work gets efficiently done and few issues pops up that are not automatically solved by way of previously achieved alignment. While using this strategy, what generally drives more meetings are: 1) Managers and other power holders that cares more about their importance and status than the work. 2) The parts of the staff that are dissatisfied and don’t like their work. In many of these cases, they have been obviously neglected/abused by management before and don’t feel trust in the organization.
Havoc 7y ago
As unpopular as it might be - I kinda like open offices for this reason. (work type dependent). Having the 4x mission critical managers sitting in a cluster & overhearing each other's conversations did wonders for keeping everyone on the same wavelength - without meetings. [offtopic] Was a bit of an eye opener how powerful that can be. 40 man team, insane yearly sprint-like pressure for 2.5 months solid. Everything continuously on fire basically...but it's fine as long as the center holds. Also had an interesting effect on team morale - they're a lot happier to charge into battle if they're confident leadership is unified.
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djohnston 7y ago
We have a 1hr weekly with just the SWE's that is definitely therapeutic. We basically just poke fun at whatever stupid things happened during the week, while still keeping our teammates abreast of our progress on tasks. It's 1 hr once per week and I definitely want to take it to my next workplace
throwaway857384 7y ago
I once talked to a manager about how meeting seemed like a waste of time, he said he loved meetings because it meant people were working together and getting things done. That made me think, that meetings were about making people feel that their work was meaningful when it wasn't. Basically, if you do meaningful work, you don't need meetings, but if its the other way around, meetings make total sense.
- bluGill 7y ago
  The problem with that is it is very easy for someone to get a lot of work done in something useless. It is very easy to keep adding more and more features to product X not realizing the the product will never sell enough to make the investment in releasing it worth it: you would be just as useful to the company by taking a nap. Meetings are how you get everybody on the same page on these things. Of course if it is obvious the product won't pay off you send a memo to everyone. However more likely it is a combination of the marketing person doing some productions of sales, engineering projecting how much effort is left, and then someone senior deciding if we need to invest anyway because the loss leader is still worth it for other reasons... None of this is to say you are wrong though.
deadNiggers 7y ago
But how can that be, when I actually find the meetings themselves to be absolutely traumatic and misery inducing. I question what my life has come to. Why such a pointless spinning of my wheels must keep me separated from those I care about, and force me into contact with co-worker who I know for a fact will never love me? This is torture, and the antithesis of therapy. It directly damages me, to persist in a tension inducing work environment.
markus_zhang 7y ago
Pointless work meetings always fatigue me quickly...
bob1029 7y ago
I have found that our daily standup calls are fairly therapeutic for those involved. Occasionally, a call will start with a very salty conversation regarding some topic from the prior day or concerns around schedules, but every single time it eventually evolves into a productive call. Sometimes this takes 20 seconds, sometimes this takes 20 minutes. I have a bad habit of trying to pre-empt or quench a salty exchange in progress, which usually escalates the situation further. I've found the best thing someone on the sidelines of a heated or otherwise pointless exchange can do is to come up with a completely different topic, or propose some sort of compromise. But, at the end of the day it can really help some people when you just let them yell it out for a few minutes on the phone. Doing this all the time is obviously not healthy for team dynamics, but there is always some happy medium between extremes. One other thing that can help a lot is to have structured calls and ways for people to flag things for mandatory discussion. If I am on a call that starts going sideways, having some established process where I can say something like "Hey guys, can we take a look at <some bucket of flagged items>?" can very quickly right the ship. What this does is effectively remind everyone that we are here to do a job with certain degree of professionalism and diligence. Everyone also has a vested interest in getting to the bucket of review items, because these are usually the topics creating the most stress day-to-day, and talking through them with the team is an excellent means to relieve much of that stress.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
They aren't therapy for me. It takes me a while to get into the zone if I'm doing anything that I would consider "creative" as far as coding. Incessant meetings break up my day into chunks that aren't useful. I don't mind status meetings but a recent job turned into 3 or 4 meetings a day for half and hour at a time and that destroys my day and creates a lot of stress. I think sending a status to the team once a day is fine. If you want my attention email me and we'll set something up. This public flogging that managers like to pull at meetings really is stress inducing.
throwaway713 7y ago
This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn’t to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never the case), but merely that almost all productive work is done independently. If I ran my own company, I would ban almost all meetings and limit the most crucial ones to 15 minutes tops. And while my company might fail due to a misplaced sense of schadenfreude, it’s a risk I’m willing to take to get experimental verification of whether meetings are actually as valuable as everyone claims they are.
- journalctl 7y ago
  I work with people like that. They’re extremely siloed and they make decisions in a vacuum. It always ends up creating problems for everyone else. Then when we actually do have meetings, they don’t want to collaborate or discuss, they just want everything immediately, end of discussion. It doesn’t work. If you don’t want to work with other people, move out into the woods.
18monthsin 7y ago
If your meetings are non productive blame yourself and start proposing topics thay result in actionable innovations.
dredmorbius 7y ago
"Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. he was also conducting one of the oldest, most important --- and, unhappily, one of the least understood --- rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examinging for a moment. Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides of meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, pp 138-139.
whack 7y ago
> Prof Hall says as a result, meetings can become "maligned somewhat unnecessarily". But he argues that negativity towards meetings can be because their real purposes are misunderstood... the real purpose of such meetings might be to assert the authority of an organisation, so that employees are reminded that they are part of it. Such meetings are not really about making any decisions, he says. We're supposed to feel less negativity towards meetings once we realize that its a way for the organization to assert its power over us? Reading this article only made me feel more negativity toward meetings, not less. What kind of an egotistical blowhard would prefer wasting his team's time and productivity, just to assert his own power and feel better about himself
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  That's only some meetings ("Many regular, internal meetings") which are speculated to be mere demonstrations of authority. Not all meetings fall in this category, and it seems useful (and good for your happiness) to be able to discern these when deciding which meetings are worth your time to attend.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  I would argue that the purpose is not tyranny, but to make you feel like you are part of a team, and that people's progress is being checked on. If tou start feeling "whether I do honest work or slack, it makes no difference" you might start losing motivation.
black_puppydog 7y ago
The text kind of reads to me like those meetings are therapeutic mostly for the people that cannot really justify having a job there to begin with... This really reminds me of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and the solution to that would be a restructuring of society that doesn't require being in an employer/employee situation to be a valuable part of society.
teddyh 7y ago
Original source, in Swedish: https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt-rykte/ https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-dali...
randomsearch 7y ago
If you’re a meeting maker, one thing to consider is that a one hour meeting for eight people is equivalent (maybe at a minimum) to 12 hours work. Ask yourself, if I could achieve what that meeting will achieve by spending 12 hours working alone in a room, would I see that as a good use of my time? Because that’s what you’re doing. Meetings had better be damn important and genuinely require active participation from all attendees.
nbonaparte 7y ago
yxIjdy;6;d

510 points by DarkContinent 7y ago

WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting. Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

jka 7y ago
The article is, in part, suggesting that it's exactly those kind of status-conscious people who benefit from 'meeting therapy': "Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration." But yep, that might not be ideal for a participant who would prefer to be making progress on something else. I've seen a bunch of tech companies start to suggest to employees that they can and should leave meetings if they don't feel like their presence is important.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  "outlet for people at work" hints that benefits everybody, or the majority. "outlet for management" sounds quite different.
  - jka 7y ago
    Yep; I'd imagine that's an intentional distinction by the author. Some people might act this way regardless of whether they move between a management or individual contributor role.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Sounds like the management - who are also employees - are the ones who get to vent.
abawany 7y ago
In fact one of the easiest way to get disinvited from such meetings and get a less-good performance review next time around is to make a bit of noise about the utility of such meetings (edit: from my personal/anecdotal experience). Serendipity is good.

lukethomas 7y ago

There's some truth to this, but holy smokes, another meeting is not the cure. There is value in "venting" at work. A few years ago I built a software tool that pings people at the end of the week asking how their week went. Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. In fact, some people literally called it therapeutic. It turns out that writing things down can serve as a form of "therapy" (source: https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/ https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/) If you lead a team, I'd strongly recommend you have a feedback mechanism like this in place, but a meeting is not the right medium. It's just a place for the extroverts to complain. If you do hold a meeting for this stuff, a 1-1 is probably the best way to surface a similar level of information.

bloopernova 7y ago
> Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. This is very much me. I am an introvert, and despite being a team lead, will get run over by louder more assertive folks. I'm learning to stick up for myself (only been a lead for 2 months) but it's a long road. With an email or chat, I can reformulate what I mean to say multiple times. Refine my message and make it clearer and cite sources. I can also take the time to examine my emotions and motivations in creating the email, and sometimes just discard a whole email if I've managed to work through something myself. Unfortunately for people like me, extroverts tend to be most visible so their preferred way of doing things, talking in meetings, is how a lot of business seems to be conducted.
- tomrod 7y ago
  You sound similar to me a few years back! Here is what I did (suggested by a boss who was magic with meeting effectiveness), YMMV: - Come to meetings with a short list of decisions to be made or expected contributions - Bring suggested resolutions if I owned the meeting / was primary technical resource / team lead and had some to suggest -- and communicate that these are the default in absence of consensus or buy-in - Put discussion time allotted stacked to each decision to be made (moderately flexible) - Always end meetings early if no more content is to be discussed Meeting agendas can be powerful.

asaph 7y ago

People should decline pointless meetings.

helpPeople 7y ago
What if it's pointless to you, but someone else needs to hear the status because they need to decide what's important to tell the vice president?
- asaph 7y ago
  Do you mean the Bee-Watcher wants to know what to tell the Bee-Watcher-Watcher?
  - potta_coffee 7y ago
    I no-shit had a manager that made zero decisions or contributions, but wanted detailed notes on what we were doing so that he could take credit for our work in meetings.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
An interesting idea...supposedly at Tesla and SpaceX, Elon recommended that anyone who found a meeting to be pointless should get up and leave immediately. I don't know if that's still the practice, maybe someone from those companies can chime in.
- crustacean 7y ago
  That has presumably worked _for Elon_...
- abawany 7y ago
  David Marcus (FB, previously PayPal) had (has?) a similar stated policy regarding meetings.
crustacean 7y ago
If my meetings happened as described with no one rescheduling or derailing them then actually my meeting life would be fine. I want to go to the meetings described on my calendar. But nearly every time “It’s a trap!”

bransonf 7y ago

The problem I experience with meetings is that often times the information presented is only tangentially related to you. I hate it when I’m in a meeting and it ends up a conversation between two people. It’s stressful if you have an expectation to get something done but also an expectation to sit in a meeting you realize really doesn’t pertain to you.

Bartweiss 7y ago
Once upon a time, this was the point of circulating 'minutes' or a summary after meetings. Outside of some special cases (e.g. the Federal Reserve), they're specifically meant to reflect conclusions, not the full course of discussion. Back-and-forth that reaches an answer isn't needed, and a debate that ends unresolved would just read as a summary of the positions. That way, you can invite the people who need to speak in a meeting, while anyone who just needs to be informed about the result can catch up from a shorter, async source. It seems like easy video recording and calling have been one reason for the decline - minutes were handy if someone couldn't make the meeting, but now they can dial in or watch it afterwards. That's great for not having to create a summary, but I think it loses much of the value of a concise, written record of what happened.
- dpeck 7y ago
  The number of people who have ever watched/listened to a business meeting after it occurred is vanishingly small.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Depends on the minutes. I've seen some where the entire minutes where things like "Heard the report from the director of X on the state of Y". I would like to know if the department in question is a useful use of my tax dollars, so I really want to know what the state of Y is, but I'll probably need to do a FOIA request to get it.
jjkmk 7y ago
I guess it depends how big your team is and how big the company is. Working on a small team at my current company I don't have this issue at all. I remember when working at IBM that was my main gripe.

rusk 7y ago

Sounds like a local maximum at the organisational scale.

cyborgx7 7y ago

I've had times when a pointless meeting with too many participants was a welcome break. Of course, just reducing the work week and having more free time would be a lot better. But I'll take what I can get.

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email. It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication. Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration. The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style. So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.

steve1977 7y ago
Yeah you have to get rid of pointless managers. Pointless meetings will disappear automatically then.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Pointless meetings are just a part of meetings. Imo you can't have valuable meetings without pointless ones. Knowing how to best minimise the toil is key.
mipmap04 7y ago
I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.

ckastner 7y ago

The article lacks one important detail: number of companies studied. Because frankly, it sounds a lot like n=1, and generalizing from one (or possibly a few) dysfunctional examples is a fallacy. And even if there were an overall trend: not addressing other scenarios seems like a substantial omission regardless. The article makes it sound like the whole world needs status validation and/or a place to vent. I know enough places where stuff like that gets shut down, hard.

holstvoogd 7y ago

I call BS. Meetings make me lose the will to live & drove me to quitting my job multiple times. If you want to make sure I don''t do anything during the day, put in a meeting in the middle of it. Perhaps it helps people who have pointless jobs that create no value?

cabraca 7y ago
I call your BS call :) There is nothing better than a day with nicely spaced meetings My current Project on every second wednesday: 10:00-10:30 Daily Standup 11:00-12:00 Architect Jour Fix 12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak 13:00-14:00 Sprint Retro 15:00-16:00 Sprint Planning Most of the gaps have a reason (conflicting meetings, etc) We use those gaps to "transfer knowledge". That basically means we sit in the cafeteria chatting about work or non-work relatet stuff, planning our weekends, etc.
- t34543 7y ago
  Terrifying schedule. I can handle maybe an hour of two of meetings per day, max two days per week. Daily meetings are a non starter for me.
  - cabraca 7y ago
    its not daily. its one day every two weeks.
    - dasmoth 7y ago
      The standup is still daily though, right?
      - cabraca 7y ago
        yes
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Wait, you're actually putting that forward as a good day? That boggles my mind...if you come in at 9, get settled, you have maybe 45 minutes to work. Then, until 14-15, you have NO one hour stretch, then you have just one more stretch from 16-17...when do you actually code?? Don't you need a couple hours of focused time?

brodo 7y ago

Can anyone find the original paper? The press release is here: https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad-reputation/ https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad...

teddyh 7y ago
The Swedish version of the press release (https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt-rykte/ https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-dali...) has a reference; it seems to be a book: Mötesboken : Tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel, by Malin Åkerström, Vesa Leppänen & Patrik Hall. (ISBN 978-91-984203-6-4) https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc-acbb-91a16f042c07 https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc-...

roland35 7y ago

I thought Wrike had a pretty good infographic on deciding whether or not to have a meeting: https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2015/06/Should-we-have-this-meeting-e1434381032233.jpg?av=b36e9b420136299c52657400eb7d40a0 https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2... Basically you should have a meeting if: * It can't be solved by collaborating outside a meeting * Everyone is needed to participate * The group has authority to act * There is a clear agenda and goals * Someone can be the facilitator I have found that if a meeting has all those elements than a lot can get done very quickly, rather than having ideas bounce around email or slack for weeks!

robotmay 7y ago

This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but if you're actually trying to be productive it's a horror-show. I had a 3 hour meeting a few weeks back, and then another meeting directly after it which was a summary of the previous meeting. Add to that the fact that 90% of the company are incapable of being on time to those meetings, and you can probably guess as to one of the reasons I'm moving on to another company. The meetings are usually also at short notice and the person who requests it will universally be late to their own meeting. I see excessive meetings and calls as a failure of written communication skills. The people I see organising the most meetings are also those who are least adept at understanding writing, and the worst at communicating via it themselves. There's definitely an art to being a good written communicator, and maybe there should be more emphasis placed on it when recruiting in tech roles.

dhdhebsb 7y ago
I must work at the same place
journalctl 7y ago
Lots of meetings can also be a sign of churn. If people can’t make decisions, or consistently flip flop on decisions, it can be reflected in lots of (ultimately pointless) meetings.

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Nokinside 7y ago

Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented. Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of view yet.'

altacc 7y ago
So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.
- patcon 7y ago
  Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp. What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders prioritise leadership via _authority_. Think of it as accruing power in the edges vs the nodes of the social graph. Fun fact: countries whose leader cultures are more individualist (e.g. America) are MUCH more likely to have whole populations who agree highly with "economic growth is important above all else", whereas collectivist leader nations (e.g., Taiwan, Finland) have a general populace who agree less highly with that phrase, but MORE highly with "ecological sustainability and environmental stewardship are important". So while correlation doesn't prove causation, it may be the case that American-style individualist leadership culture is in opposition to our shared goals of non extinction :) but that's maybe a leap. The whole study is really rad. Oh, and more bonus: collectivist leadership style correlates highly with feminine leadership style (another axes of Hofstede study) EDIT: a-ha! Found the source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

mbubb 7y ago

Makes me think of Ray Dalio on transparency and 'meaningful work'. I agree that people want to vent and be heard but as others have noted meetings turn into a way for management to reinscribe control and turn complaints back on the complainant (Learned helplessness,etc) If we need meetings to define our job then that is pretty unclear management. If you dont see how your role pertains to the overall goals of the org and need meetings to figure this out then there is a general disfunction. Meaningful work and the ability to give and receive feedback. Less meetings.

cryptica 7y ago

It's therapy for the worst kinds of people. For productive people, meetings are horrible; akin to sitting there and watching a bunch of monkeys howling and banging on their chests to maximize the amount of bananas that they're going to get at the end of the month.

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throwaway68AC2 7y ago

I feel fairly alarmed and skeptical at the idea of managers being therapists, not because I think it’s a bad idea — in fact I think it ought to be a good one — but because in my experience, most of the folks asking for your vulnerability in the business world aren’t willing to off any in turn.

ilaksh 7y ago
No, its not the managers who are therapists. Everyone forced to go to their meetings are providing free therapy for them.
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WhompingWindows 7y ago

Isn't this title a contradiction? They aren't pointless meetings if they are therapeutic for the attendees. Now, what about pointless AND non-therapeutic, is that possible?

sargram01 7y ago

There’s also the class of pointless meeting where nontechnical managers don’t understand what they’re responsible for so use them to as a way to “manage by feel”. They call them to see what people’s reactions are to fishing questions to judge the situation, and to use them as training sessions. These I find to be the most counterproductive meetings.

Nursie 7y ago

> Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration. Yup, see this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I try to avoid most of them. Nothing gets done, half the people aren't really prepared, and the usual outcome is the guys with the biggest egos sound off and make themselves feel important and everyone else just has a good old moan. It may be therapy for them, but I'd rather not be there, thanks!

kube-system 7y ago

I'm not sure meetings in most organizations are the result of people 'asserting authority' or people 'unsure of their role'. Almost no managers are calling meetings to fulfill some hidden agenda or personal gratification. Most are called by people who are legitimately trying to solve a problem. They're just a product of a lazy/ineffective management style. The problem is, proper task delegation requires a lot of work: 1. understanding the problem (probably the hardest problem) 2. understanding the organization and resources 3. breaking down the problem 4. assigning tasks appropriately 5. managing time, both of the process, and the delegates of the tasks. When a manager does this properly, it's not a very 'visible' process, so nobody really knows they've done all this work. Alternatively, lazy managers can just call everyone into a room and let them figure out everything. It doesn't require any upfront planning or understanding of the problem. And it comes with the bonus of high-visibility. TL;DR: meetings are the result of lazy management.

kstenerud 7y ago

In other words, more and more people are being employed in pointless jobs. There isn't enough actual work to go around, but everyone needs to be "employed". And since they subconsciously know that their jobs are pointless, they need to justify their existence through posturing and status and "visibility" and report production (which nobody reads) and endless meetings. Lots of activity, but little actual achievement. Middle management only ever grows @1, because everyone in the middle is in the same boat, and having more people under you makes you more important and less likely to lose your job or have your department cut. @1: With the exception of the massive job purges the mega-corporations do once a decade or so.

webew 7y ago

This reminds me of open-plan offices. What a nightmare.

corodra 7y ago

Wasn't it Microsoft Japan that realized meetings were naturally crunched down to strictly useful ones when they went to a 4 day work week? Then more time was spent doing real, actual work and then workers being able to ACTUALLY relax at home or doing something truly therapeutic... like not being at fucking work. Not this bullshit "you can relax at work" crap. Oh, and their employees felt ACTUALLY better and ACTUALLY less stressed. I feel like this "study" is more a focus-group bullshit attempt to fight off the results of a 4 day work week. The world is getting silly. Not because of studies like this. But because people actually agree with obvious bullshit like this. I feel like I'm taking damn crazy pills.

throwaway5752 7y ago

One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it. There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly structured meetings that waste time. But a sizeable (mostly) silent group of people appreciate reasonably scheduled and structured meetings in the way described in this article. To each their own.

manmal 7y ago
I don’t like meetings because they are not „productive time“, but I do like them because they do, as you wrote, fulfill my socialization needs. Onsite meetings work way better for me in that regard.

waspleg 7y ago

"People often feel marginalised. They feel that they have no influence or position. In these cases, the perception is that meetings do not improve anything, but actually cause even more frustration." Literally the last paragraph hits the nail on the head for, I'd wager, the vast majority of people.

ubu7737 7y ago
I agree with you, but I want to add some precision to this. In some meetings I feel powerless, and I find them absolutely horrible. In other meetings I have a voice anytime I want to use it, and I feel powerful, and I wouldn't miss them for anything less than a diarrhea poisoning incident. Edit: In most meetings I feel neutral and disaffected.

hurrdurr2 7y ago

We are a manufacturing facility and the amount of meetings to discuss how to best implement LEAN, 6S, and kaizen has become comical. Many of these meetings indeed turn into complaint fests between managers from different groups.

viburnum 7y ago

It makes sense, since most therapy is about as useful as pointless work meetings.

eris_agx 7y ago

This articles reminds me of Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law Without efficient ways of doing things managers want more people doing things like them. Like the traffic problem doesn't get better with more lanes.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Exactly and the point I was going to make, and pointed at in the article (toward the end). Uncosted inputs will be used to the limits of tolerance of costed inputs. Time is a near-universal uncosted input, at least in internal allocation.

rdiddly 7y ago

Oh I have no doubt that they're therapy... for certain people who need therapy. I even referred to a certain recurring meeting recently that always tends to be mostly a particular guy talking, as his therapy session. So I feel vindicated now!

theonemind 7y ago

I don't disagree with the article. Without articulating it, I always thought so--precisely that makes many meetings so infuriating for me personally. I don't have the job title of therapist or actor/background extra.

Ericson2314 7y ago

The ideas are not knew here, and I am largely sympathetic, but it's really funny to hear what is usually normally presented in David Graeber "you should relate to this and be mad" form here presented presented in dry "studies show..." form.

drugsupplychain 7y ago

There's an interesting hatred of meetings by software engineers, and I think it's to far on the hatred spectrum. There's definitely a lot to hate about meetings and they are very poorly run in general. But the argument of "when do you do actual work!" is not a good one. If you run an organization of 200 people, it's a lot more effective for 25 people to spend all of their time making the efficiency of the team, and impact of the team on the business as high as possible, than it is to increase the team size to 225. If those 25 people can, through messy meetings, debates, and emotional outbursts, somehow make 200 ppl twice as effective, that's great! I think a better framing for meetings is not by looking at the battle, but the war. Individually, yeah it can suck. But the goal is to ensure a large amount of individuals march in the same direction, toward the same goal, and are progressing the business forward. Some amount of work is needed for that. Let's optimize for maximizing that impact, not how "good" the process feels.

randomsearch 7y ago
Coding takes an enormous amount of concentration and headspace. Meetings are context switches that make retaining focus much harder. That’s why coders hate them.

antipaul 7y ago

Important context quote: “Instead he says there has been a rise of managerial roles, which are often not very well defined, and where "the hierarchy is not that clear".“ So this article doesn’t apply to tech-focused organizations. For sure, meetings are still relevant there, but should trend to fewer not more

ilaksh 7y ago

"Many managers don't know what to do," he says, and when they are "unsure of their role", they respond by generating more meetings. Another reason that we should have less managers and instead elevate engineers into dual engineer/executive positions.

GordonS 7y ago

True story: A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were some relatively meaningful small meetings closely related to actual development work. Everyone was losing the will to live, including myself - there simply wasn't enough time to actually work! I had a word with the project manager, and with a totally casual manner he said: "OK, let's have a meeting with the whole team to discuss it".

pc86 7y ago
It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person. And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings (agreed it's definitely too many though).
- GordonS 7y ago
  > It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person So, it's meant to be an amusing anecdote on HN; I haven't told the entire story of the project :) The PM had heard this from several other team members alread, several times. The difference is I was tech lead, so he listened a bit more to me, and I was also quite adamant this time (I'd tried to tell him more politely numerous times). > And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings Bingo, this was the biggest problem - the project manager in particular was bad for telling irrelevant people to join meetings.
mr-ron 7y ago
All those meetings are necessary if you do by the book scrum. But usually it's the tech lead role that's most important to have attend. Did the whole team attended each of these?

havkom 7y ago

Many meetings are extremely important for me as a manager. Very few of the meetings are about “deciding things”, rather they are about aligning views. As a manager I see my role as setting up meetings so that the most qualified peoples views properly influences the right stake holders. When everyone aligns on what problem to solve and how to solve it there are generally no need to take any decisions, since work gets efficiently done and few issues pops up that are not automatically solved by way of previously achieved alignment. While using this strategy, what generally drives more meetings are: 1) Managers and other power holders that cares more about their importance and status than the work. 2) The parts of the staff that are dissatisfied and don’t like their work. In many of these cases, they have been obviously neglected/abused by management before and don’t feel trust in the organization.

Havoc 7y ago

As unpopular as it might be - I kinda like open offices for this reason. (work type dependent). Having the 4x mission critical managers sitting in a cluster & overhearing each other's conversations did wonders for keeping everyone on the same wavelength - without meetings. [offtopic] Was a bit of an eye opener how powerful that can be. 40 man team, insane yearly sprint-like pressure for 2.5 months solid. Everything continuously on fire basically...but it's fine as long as the center holds. Also had an interesting effect on team morale - they're a lot happier to charge into battle if they're confident leadership is unified.

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djohnston 7y ago

We have a 1hr weekly with just the SWE's that is definitely therapeutic. We basically just poke fun at whatever stupid things happened during the week, while still keeping our teammates abreast of our progress on tasks. It's 1 hr once per week and I definitely want to take it to my next workplace

throwaway857384 7y ago

I once talked to a manager about how meeting seemed like a waste of time, he said he loved meetings because it meant people were working together and getting things done. That made me think, that meetings were about making people feel that their work was meaningful when it wasn't. Basically, if you do meaningful work, you don't need meetings, but if its the other way around, meetings make total sense.

bluGill 7y ago
The problem with that is it is very easy for someone to get a lot of work done in something useless. It is very easy to keep adding more and more features to product X not realizing the the product will never sell enough to make the investment in releasing it worth it: you would be just as useful to the company by taking a nap. Meetings are how you get everybody on the same page on these things. Of course if it is obvious the product won't pay off you send a memo to everyone. However more likely it is a combination of the marketing person doing some productions of sales, engineering projecting how much effort is left, and then someone senior deciding if we need to invest anyway because the loss leader is still worth it for other reasons... None of this is to say you are wrong though.

deadNiggers 7y ago

But how can that be, when I actually find the meetings themselves to be absolutely traumatic and misery inducing. I question what my life has come to. Why such a pointless spinning of my wheels must keep me separated from those I care about, and force me into contact with co-worker who I know for a fact will never love me? This is torture, and the antithesis of therapy. It directly damages me, to persist in a tension inducing work environment.

markus_zhang 7y ago

Pointless work meetings always fatigue me quickly...

bob1029 7y ago

I have found that our daily standup calls are fairly therapeutic for those involved. Occasionally, a call will start with a very salty conversation regarding some topic from the prior day or concerns around schedules, but every single time it eventually evolves into a productive call. Sometimes this takes 20 seconds, sometimes this takes 20 minutes. I have a bad habit of trying to pre-empt or quench a salty exchange in progress, which usually escalates the situation further. I've found the best thing someone on the sidelines of a heated or otherwise pointless exchange can do is to come up with a completely different topic, or propose some sort of compromise. But, at the end of the day it can really help some people when you just let them yell it out for a few minutes on the phone. Doing this all the time is obviously not healthy for team dynamics, but there is always some happy medium between extremes. One other thing that can help a lot is to have structured calls and ways for people to flag things for mandatory discussion. If I am on a call that starts going sideways, having some established process where I can say something like "Hey guys, can we take a look at <some bucket of flagged items>?" can very quickly right the ship. What this does is effectively remind everyone that we are here to do a job with certain degree of professionalism and diligence. Everyone also has a vested interest in getting to the bucket of review items, because these are usually the topics creating the most stress day-to-day, and talking through them with the team is an excellent means to relieve much of that stress.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

They aren't therapy for me. It takes me a while to get into the zone if I'm doing anything that I would consider "creative" as far as coding. Incessant meetings break up my day into chunks that aren't useful. I don't mind status meetings but a recent job turned into 3 or 4 meetings a day for half and hour at a time and that destroys my day and creates a lot of stress. I think sending a status to the team once a day is fine. If you want my attention email me and we'll set something up. This public flogging that managers like to pull at meetings really is stress inducing.

throwaway713 7y ago

This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn’t to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never the case), but merely that almost all productive work is done independently. If I ran my own company, I would ban almost all meetings and limit the most crucial ones to 15 minutes tops. And while my company might fail due to a misplaced sense of schadenfreude, it’s a risk I’m willing to take to get experimental verification of whether meetings are actually as valuable as everyone claims they are.

journalctl 7y ago
I work with people like that. They’re extremely siloed and they make decisions in a vacuum. It always ends up creating problems for everyone else. Then when we actually do have meetings, they don’t want to collaborate or discuss, they just want everything immediately, end of discussion. It doesn’t work. If you don’t want to work with other people, move out into the woods.

18monthsin 7y ago

If your meetings are non productive blame yourself and start proposing topics thay result in actionable innovations.

dredmorbius 7y ago

"Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. he was also conducting one of the oldest, most important --- and, unhappily, one of the least understood --- rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examinging for a moment. Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides of meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, pp 138-139.

whack 7y ago

> Prof Hall says as a result, meetings can become "maligned somewhat unnecessarily". But he argues that negativity towards meetings can be because their real purposes are misunderstood... the real purpose of such meetings might be to assert the authority of an organisation, so that employees are reminded that they are part of it. Such meetings are not really about making any decisions, he says. We're supposed to feel less negativity towards meetings once we realize that its a way for the organization to assert its power over us? Reading this article only made me feel more negativity toward meetings, not less. What kind of an egotistical blowhard would prefer wasting his team's time and productivity, just to assert his own power and feel better about himself

tomjakubowski 7y ago
That's only some meetings ("Many regular, internal meetings") which are speculated to be mere demonstrations of authority. Not all meetings fall in this category, and it seems useful (and good for your happiness) to be able to discern these when deciding which meetings are worth your time to attend.
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
I would argue that the purpose is not tyranny, but to make you feel like you are part of a team, and that people's progress is being checked on. If tou start feeling "whether I do honest work or slack, it makes no difference" you might start losing motivation.

black_puppydog 7y ago

The text kind of reads to me like those meetings are therapeutic mostly for the people that cannot really justify having a job there to begin with... This really reminds me of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and the solution to that would be a restructuring of society that doesn't require being in an employer/employee situation to be a valuable part of society.

teddyh 7y ago

Original source, in Swedish: https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt-rykte/ https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-dali...

randomsearch 7y ago

If you’re a meeting maker, one thing to consider is that a one hour meeting for eight people is equivalent (maybe at a minimum) to 12 hours work. Ask yourself, if I could achieve what that meeting will achieve by spending 12 hours working alone in a room, would I see that as a good use of my time? Because that’s what you’re doing. Meetings had better be damn important and genuinely require active participation from all attendees.

nbonaparte 7y ago

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